However it is important to note that the range of borrowings goes beyond the scope to be expected for a situation where two neighbouring peoples exchange material goods: Firstly, there are many Tamil loanwords pertaining to everyday and social life (kinship terms, body parts, ordinary activities etc.); secondly, not only lexical words (nouns, adjectives and verbs) but also at least one function word (ōnē) has been borrowed. This--along with the deep impact Tamil has had on Sinhalese syntax (e.g. the use of a verbal adjective of "to say" as a subordinating conjunction meaning "whether" and "that")--is the result of not only close coexistence but the existence of large numbers of bilinguals and a high degree of mixing, intermarriage, etc.

Tamil loanwords in Sinhalese can appear in the same form as the original word (e.g. akkā), but this is quite rare. Usually, a word has undergone some kind of modification to fit into the Sinhalese phonological (e.g. paḻi becomes paḷi(ya) because the sound of /ḻ/, ɻ, does not exist in the Sinhalese phoneme inventory) or morphological system (e.g. ilakkam becomes ilakkama because Sinhalese inanimate nouns (see grammatical gender) need to end with /a/, ə, in order to be declineable).

These are the main ways Tamil words are incorporated into the Sinhalese lexicon with different endings:

With an /a/ added to Tamil words ending in /m/ and other consonants (e.g. pālam > pālama).

With a /ya/ or /va/ added to words ending in vowels (e.g. araḷi > araliya).

It can be observed that the Tamil phonemes /ḷ/ and /ḻ/ do not coherently appear as /ḷ/ in Sinhalese but sometimes as /l/ as well. This is due to the fact that in Sinhalese pronunciation there is no distinction between /ḷ/ and /l/; the letter /ḷ/ is merely maintained as an etymologicalspelling.

In many cases, the appearance of a loanword in a language indicates whether the borrowing is old or more recent: The more a word deviates from the "original" one, the longer it must have been a part of the respective lexicon, because while being used, a word can undergo changes (sometimes regular sound changes along with the native words). The inversion of this argument is not possible since loanwords already matching the linguistic requirements of the target language may remain unchanged. Thus, the word täpäl (Tamil tapāl) gives away its old age because the respective umlaut processes took place before the 8th century CE; iḍama (Tamil iṭam) however needn't be a recent borrowing, because no sound changes that could have affected this word have taken place in Sinhalese since at least the 13th century CE.

In the following list, Tamil words are romanized in accordance with Tamil spelling. This results in seeming discrepancies in voicing between Sinhalese words and their Tamil counterparts. Sinhalese borrowing however has taken place on the basis of the sound of the Tamil words; thus, the word ampalam, ambalam, logically results in the Sinhalese spelling ambalama, and so forth.